I'm an Emmy-winning former NBC and Wall Street Journal reporter turned speaker and strategist on quotability, connective behavior and making places and conferences more meaningful by storyboarding them. I’ve been a state senator’s chief of staff, co-founder of nine PACs, founding board member of Annie’s Homegrown and coached over 30 pre-IPO teams. Like you, perhaps, I am inordinately curious about why we do what we do. I also write for the Huffington Post and Harvard Business Review and am the author of Moving From Me to We, Resolving Conflict Sooner, Walk Your Talk and Getting What You Want. Let's share ideas at www.sayitbetter.com, Moving From Me to We and @kareanderson

How Lance Helps Us Avoid Our Temptation to Lie

After nearly 15 years of vehement denials, Armstrong mayown up, it is rumored. He promises he’ll answer Oprah’s interview questions “directly, honestly and candidly.” Yet the January 17th interview is already a verypublic, “social” and even global event that includes a newspaper ad suggesting the questions that Oprah should ask. He has alot at risk. ”

Like watching a kid actually pee in the pool rather than imagining how many people have, the stark reality of seeing Lance Armstrong admit to Oprah that he was doping, if he does, will hit hard. That’s what Dan Ariely’s research indicates. He’s the author of The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty. When what was long rumored to be true becomes real, especially seeing someone admit it in real time, our feelings are more intensely felt and contagious. Here are some very human lessons we can learn, from Lance’s situation, about the slippery slope of deceit, alleged and otherwise.

1. Soon after you do some small thing wrong beware of the stories you start telling yourself about it

Sometimes not knowing something for sure or rationalizing our behavior is emotionally easier, at first, yet may become a more destructive habit later, suggests Ariely. Like actually seeing a kid pee in the pool you are about to dive into, or believing the five-second rule of not eating something you just dropped on the floor, like that warm chocolate chip cookie. Who knows what stories those JP Morgan Chase managers told themselves when the deception started at the bank? Did they feel safer when banks’ reputations were tanking and CEO Jamie Dimon actually got the best title a banker could get at the time, “the least-hated banker in America”? Notes Ariely, “Now we have about three billion dollars to prove the contrary.”

2. Our delusion deepens as our cheating does

“We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sound reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better,” discovered Ariely via his experiments.

Warning:Peter Guber, in Tell to Win, advises us to create “purposefulnarratives” that inspire others to play a role in our story, and, in so doing, reshape and share it. Yet that advice has a dark side when the storyteller has been successfully deceiving others with it and many have succumbed to the allure to play an unwitting or unsavory part.

3. Fight the fudge factor

Armstrong is charged with involving teammates and others with collectively organizing dope delivery and use, not with taking actual bribes. We are more tempted to be dishonest in situations where we can distance ourselves from the act. Writes Ariely, “the psychological distance between a dishonest act and its consequences creates a fudge factor of rationalization. Thus we are more likely to take computer paper home from work than money from a petty cash box. In an experiment, more MIT dorm students stole food from the dorm refrigerator than cash. Ariely worries that adoption of this fudge factor will become a more wide spread rationalization as we increasingly move towards cashless culture.

“A long as we cheat by only a little bit, we can benefit from cheating and still view ourselves as marvelous human beings, writes Ariely. He calls this “balancing act” the capacity to rationalize The Fudge Factor.

In fact, “Most people, when directly confronted with proof that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously,” suggests Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson in Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me). “Self-justification has costs and benefits. By itself it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It lets us sleep at night. Without it we would prolong the awful pangs of embarrassment. We would torture ourselves with regret over the road not taken or over how badly we navigated the road we did take. We would agonize in the aftermath of almost every decision… Yet mindless self-justification, like quicksand, can draw us deeper into disaster. It blocks our ability to even see our errors, let alone correct them. It distorts reality, keeping us from getting all the information we need and assessing issues clearly.”

4. When forced to give up a deception, become the (former) sinner who saves others

Maybe Lance can pull off a FrankAbagnalepivot into a fresh chapter of his public life story. Abagnale turned his adventures as a clever con man into a Catch Me If You Can book that became a movie and Broadway play. He transformed himself into a highly paid speaker and consultant who “reveals how he learned to live on the right side of the law.” Of course he had to spend five years in prison first. Armstrong already started down that redemptive path, founding the popular foundation for cancer patients, even if he recently had to leave it behind.

5. A wild idea for Armstrong’s personal and brand redemption

Perhaps, Armstrong could join forces with Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens who just got blackballed from the Hall of Fame. They could start down the path of re-branding them selves by ardently advocating measures to reduce the temptation for budding athletes to take performance-enhancing drugs – or otherwise cheat.

That’s taking two lessons from Chris Christie unlikely allies playbook: boldly, at the risk of losing some allies, putting your core constituency first, in part by forging a problem-addressing and power-leveraging, perhaps temporary alliances with President Obama and Andrew Cuomo.

Also, I’ll bet the much-respected co-authors of Help the Helper might find such a cause in keeping with the core message of their book, how to spur selfless behavior in support of a tight-knit, pro athlete team and actual boost team performance in so doing. Along the way they could hone a new facet of their personality.

6. In a connected world it’s less likely you will get away with lying… for long

It make take a long time yet, ultimately, the deception will catch up with you. The bigger the lie, the more viral the story, especially if you are a public person and, increasingly, we all are. Here are two recent, powerful examples of what I’ll dub the Boomerang of Public Betrayal:

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So many people are predicting what Lance will say, Jay, thank you for adding your projection. Fascinating how this “event” is sucking interest from not only the past players from cycling and other sports, regulatory and ethics folks but from people who are “just” fascinated by long sagas of apparently deceitful behavior in many parts of our culture… important lessons on how connected we are when we do right or wrong eh?

Yes, if there is one universal thing that people everywhere can relate to, it is lying and fear of being caught out. But the key point of interest here is the confession. It’s almost as if we need Lance Armstrong to confess that he lied, even if most of us don’t need further evidence that he did.

Actually Jay, there is more than that we can learn, about that situation and about ways we all go down the slippery slope of wrong doing and rationalization about it, which is actual the point of this column, then citing experts on that phenomenon and what we can do to reinforce honesty in ourselves and in others. That’s why I cite the reputable experts I’ve found, from Dan Ariely to Carol Tavris.

The Lance interview is rapidly generating heat from many sides in advance of this interview that can be viewed globally in real time. From the wife of his former teammate whom he’s much maligned after she “testified under oath, that she and her husband had been present in the hospital room in 1996 when Armstrong told doctors he had doped with EPO, Human Growth Hormone and steroids” http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/i-team/hey-oprah-lance-article-1.1238932

to dubbing Oprah, “the mother confessor of the United States, the woman to whom the nation’s miscreants turn and tell all” to http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/forgive-us-oprah-for-we-have-sinned-8449249.html

to the leak that he already tearfully apologized to Livestrong staff http://abcnews.go.com/US/questions-oprah-lance-armstrong/story?id=18211227

What an analysis! I see it in people – they reprogram their memories to this alternative replay they have created for themselves. It’s a scene from a movie (~Total Recall 3). In the computer world, the “new file” overwrites the old and it replaces it.

When what you do directly affects other people is when it gets to another level. When you are a role model in a position of authority, another level still. There are more levels and they all apply to Lance Armstrong and the doping saga.

He represents the United States and he tarnished it’s brand (plus the USPS brand). Get ready though – the Bonds, Clemens Hall of Fame situations are just starting. The steroid generation is retiring or retired.

Thanks Mike for pointing out that different effect in the movie, which many scientists dispute. Regarding “another level” yes, when we gain positions of greater authority or celebrity or other kind of power it is easier to rationalize doing destructive or or deceitful behaviors, as many behaviorists have pointed out, and we instinctively know. Power corrupts… etc. And the situations are vastly different between Armstrong and Bonds as even Willie Brown has pointed out. What I most wanted to share in this column was the ways we are all tempted to steal, lie or otherwise be dishonest, with others and ourselves, based on the research of Ariely and others AND highlight their suggestions of ways to avoid that slippery slope of increase deceit, in ourselves and in others. That’s why I cited the situations and suggestions from several people including Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson, Peter Guber, Lance Armstrong, Oprah, Dan Ariely, Chris Christie, Andrew Cuomo, Rita Carter, Barry Bonds, Jamie Dimon, Roger Clemens, Frank Abagnale, Kevin Pritchard, John Eliot, John F. Kenney, Cuban missile crisis, Benjamin Schwartz, Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, James Fowler,

Trust is a precious commodity and the lesson here from a leadership point of view is significant. We researched which human behaviors inside organizations most engender team trust and the results overwhelmingly pointed to one behavior above all else: Trust comes from doing what you say you are going to do. We’ve got 15 years here of doing the opposite. We all know that words are different from actions. As leaders, it is what we do that matters, not just what we say. @RonRicciCisco.

I had testicular cancer just like my hero CashStrong, I’m a 28 year survivor now. His sport is irrelevant to me. Do lies small and large complicate life? Do tell. Do lies gobble up “space”, space to live, to breath, to grow? Maybe Lance is an infant soul. We all get to have our lessons if we can be that egocentric. It’s easy for a guy like me, I can’t profit from cheating and lying. Give me a shot, then we can see.

No light at the end of this tunnel

It’s a terrible time. When your parents begin dying, you lose your past and you step up to the turnstile. I console myself that by outliving them, I have spared them the devastation of outliving their children. Why is life so painful? But it is. I don’t really believe in the silver lining thing or that it’s a learning experience. Learn what? How to suffer? But I do believe in stoicism. I would stop in to see my mom every day on my way to work. She died of cancer and she had it before and survived about 27 years — a good run. In the end she was rotten with it. It was all through her, even on her skin. She lay there, but she weighed about sixty-five pounds. Then I would get on the train and head for work. At the end she was in a light coma. I worked a graveyard shift. She was close and I prayed, prayed for her to die. “Take her. Please.” There was nothing left. That body wouldn’t support life. In the morning I stopped and looked on one last time and held her hand. I went home to bed and my father called me at about two pm and that was it. I know that cancer will come back and kill me in the end, too. I am certain. Anyway, something will. I pray I don’t outlive my sister. She is my best friend, after my dad dies… just her. I don’t want to be alone. My life has been lonely. I had to mourn my best friend. It’s just weight.